


Footprints in the Ashes

by willowbilly



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Character Study, Childhood, Experimental Style, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Meta, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Purple Prose, References to Childbirth, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Doubt, Self-Hatred, Stream of Consciousness, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, Unreliable Narrator, abuse of ellipses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-06-10 15:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6962521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony, Steve, and Natasha, going into Civil War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Higher Court](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6855199) by [lettered](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettered/pseuds/lettered). 
  * Inspired by [The Hero Steals a Kiss](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6954715) by [spitandvinegar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spitandvinegar/pseuds/spitandvinegar). 
  * Inspired by [House for the Atomic Age](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2359304) by [tigrrmilk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk). 



> Hey if you're here you should probs go read the fics I took inspiration from instead; they're way better.

Here, here is the thing, the beating pulse of it, squirming as it's pinned beneath the probing press of two fingers, the pads of index and middle, not the thumb because the thumb thrums with its own clamor and cannot take another's measure: Steve fights.

He is a fighter. From his early days, a preemie who came into the world squalling a war cry amidst the sparking booms and blooming smoke of the Fourth of July, his head breaching between slender white thighs, a mother, an immigrant, and a revolutionary, those same legs bearing her in the tide of a crowd marching for the rights to their futures, to their lives, for the recognition as more than chaff to be discarded, more than chattel, more than cogs in the machine of industry, and her hand was tight around Steve's as they strode forward with nothing but the bravery of lions roaring in their hearts.

Everything he was was already in him. The war was in him, long before he reached it himself, and it was still there after the ice.

Once a year Tony's father would organize his expedition, out into the Arctic waters. Searching. Tony would imagine it, swimming in the heated pool of their California summer home, the waters aquamarine green, speared through with rippling shafts of sunlight like columns ringing a colosseum, small square tiles smooth under small hands as he held his breath and dove down, traced the geometric seams, and imagined sand, imagined lions, warriors, legends out in the open air of ages past and legends drowned in the deep, quiet cold at the top of the Earth.

Everything was a story but some of them were truth. Tony knew which were which because his father said so.

His father. He was a brilliant man, a great man. Great and brilliant men did not need to be kind or caring, did not need to slow themselves down or reach out with a gentle hand for the sake of a smaller, younger mind. That's the essence of what Tony's mother crooned, combing his hair back from his forehead to kiss his brow as she tucked him into bed, the blankets soft and heavy around him. _Your father is a great man, a brilliant man. That's why he is always busy_.

He is gone.

In the study there were shelves of memorabilia, kept separate from the fog of Tony's breath by panes of clear and polished glass, Tony's own reflection like a ghost against it, and smaller, darker, a shade before the vivid, unreachable height and color, before the red, white and blue, before the hair of gold and the dust of Brooklyn summers, artist's Rockwellian oil renditions of an Adonis body, long, smooth lines and large muscles, big baby-blues and a boyish grin and a hero's square, determined jaw.

_That man,_ said his father, _that man was a real man_. A real man, a real hero, a real legend. Truth, shining out of glass display cases.

_Can I come? On the expedition?_ Tony asked once. He is older, taller. Smarter. He is building his own projects, his own tech. He will inherit the company one day. Will be entrusted with the summation of his father's legacy, his pride. His joy.

Absent assent. Half a year waiting. Careful packing of his suitcase, vibrating with anticipation, fingers shaking and numb. Cold weather gear so as not to freeze when standing at the prow of the icebreaker, at his father's side, an equal by association, tacit approval, tacit acceptance. It is everything. Everything. It is inclusion into pursuit of the ideal. Inclusion, period. And...

Years later Tony Stark says to Steve Rogers, “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.”

Tony knows it is a lie because Tony himself said it.

And...

He is gone.

Tony's father left. Without him.

He sat on the curb with his suitcase for hours, waiting for him to come back, waiting for him to remember. For him to care.

Obadiah, with his avuncular shrugs of conspiratorial fatalism, could not convince him to give it up and come back inside, and Tony's mother had to come out herself. She sat beside him without speaking until nightfall, the streetlamps flickering on, sulfur-yellow glow diffusing into the smog of the city sky and hiding the sparse spatter of sparkling stars, unseen, untouchable. She tucked him into bed that night as she did when he was little, a goodnight kiss pressed to his forehead, and Tony could almost find it within himself to understand.

Almost.

_That_ night, future past: a screaming match around the handsome Christmas tree, reflected, warped, in the red and gold orbs of the ornaments, wreathed in tinsel and bushy, fragrant pine boughs.

_“Go to hell, then!”_ It is Tony, voice raw, all the hurts of childhood having burrowed down and carved out homes inside him, shivering shards in his chest, as the shrapnel would be, later. _“See if I fucking care.”_

And later: there is silence. The clock ticking. No one knows where they are. No one answers his calls and he is frantic, sweaty, sleepless, and intoxicated by the time the police come a'knocking, faces grave, bowed downwards under the weight of the bad news held on their lips. _We regret to inform you..._

Later still: the funeral. Partly overcast, blue peeking between wispy shreds of clouds, mist in the lowlands, the tree branches reaching up bare and still, birdsong and the rumble of vehicle engines in the distance. The open graves yawn wide and deep, shadowed cool seeping out, the gathered crowd of mourners vast and somber and dressed all in black, a senator here and there. Hundred of thousands of people, and news crews to boot, cameras trained on the orphaned Stark heir, lenses hungry for sensationalism, for pain, the schadenfreude relief offered by witnessing another's grief.

The coffins, silky, gleaming wood, dark and sleek and expensive as any of the sports cars filling the garage but damn the cost anyways, were piled high with flowers, with roses red as blood and soft as satin. Closed-casket ceremony because the meat was spilling out of them, his mother lacking her face, with its compassionate eyes.

Obie's hand, heavy and expectant on his shoulder, steering him away from the reporters and shielding him from the flash of their cameras. But Tony does not cry.

Because Stark men are made of iron.

The loss holds the shards of childhood regret and resentment in stasis, as an electromagnet in a cylinder canister would the shrapnel, someday, his sternum hollowed out (death) and humming with awesome energy (life), a cool, deep blue like glacial ice. But it is the opposite: take the cold out of his warmth and he'll melt into nothing. X's for eyes.

He goes home to his parent's empty house. To his father's liquor cabinet. Breaks the glass because he doesn't have the key; he never has.

Here is the thing: Tony's a lover, not a fighter... a joke, joking! Not a lover; a joker. A _joke_. The setup and the punchline in and of himself.

Steve, now, Steve is _assured_ . Sometimes Tony would look at him and be struck by how _young_ he was; not even out of his twenties. At that age Tony was blowing off steam, responsibility. Every day was Friday; booze, drugs and hookers. Self-destruction incarnate, but you gotta burn to make some light, gotta set that fuel on fire, baby. Self-immolation's the only way to go. Genius waits for no one, genius doesn't need to play by the rules, to be polite, does not need... anybody...

Tony was a failure. Pathetic. Weak. Misguided. _Wrong_ . He knew it, learned it, over and over and over again. Yet _again,_ he would make the wrong choice, would incite disaster, no matter how hard he _tried,_ and _God_ did he ever _try_.

The road to hell, right?

Whereas Steve had never failed. Even in the prehistoric dog-days before Project Rebirth, those years of back-alley fights and bloody noses, he only had yet to succeed. He was _always. Right_.

Always. Shining. Perfect. Golden. The paradigm to strive for.

He woke from the ice, punched some aliens in the face, and there were groups, groups of _actual people,_ hailing him as the savior come again. World War II vet, just-a-kid-from-Brooklyn Jesus.

H.

Steven Grant Rogers.

_Christ_.

How did he do it? How the fuck did he do it?

Tony could look into all his father's old notes and diagrams, into the guts of the machine which imbued him with the serum, the metal monstrosity of a coffin which birthed him anew, could probably dig up the scattered fragments of Erskine's surviving work and try to piece it together, match it up to a map of Steve's DNA, and he still would not find any answers as to Steve's unwavering sense of justice, would not get to the root, the origin point, of his unfaltering convictions, would never understand how his moral compass could steer him so true.

It wasn't complex, it was neither some lost formula nor the delicate constructions of Tony's technology, so it shouldn't have been complicated. And yet, in its simplicity, Steve's infallible _rightness_ remained a mystery whose depths Tony could never plumb.

But then this time. _This time_ Tony was in the right. It was not self-interest, it was not fear, which lifted the scales from his eyes, which drove him to action as he had been driven so many times before. Everything clicked into place, everything was made clear, a singing, stinging clarification of tragedy born of an inherently flawed working model which had yet to be rectified, fine-tuned. _Corrected_.

There's a difference between freedom and deplorable callousness, between liberty and lack of accountability. It's not freedom when a small group of superpowered, no, scratch that, _overpowered_ individuals swing their weight around, blasting random bad guys into oblivion when their ingrained potential for sheer destruction almost _ensures_ massive property damage, civilian casualties. A body count.

The death of an altruistic kid named Charles Spencer, who was out to see the world, widening his horizons, who was on a mission to _help people_ and instead ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's not liberty when an elite group runs amok without limitation, without oversight or due process, when they charge into sovereign countries which have their own law enforcement without so much as a by-your-leave, create scenes of chaos, of panic and heartbreak, and then sweep out again without ever having to look the repercussions in the face, never have to console, rebuild, never have to confront the reality of the terror which they instill on the streets. That's what that is, what they do; in their blind pursuit of glory they _terrorize_.

That's not freedom or liberty. Not democracy or due process.

That's tyranny.

Tony knows what it is to be wrong. Knows what it is to charge ahead thinking you're gonna make things better and instead mucking them the fuck up. Knows that everyone has to make a mistake eventually. It's life, it's a learning process, the name of the game is failure. And Steve...

Steve's number has come up.

Steve does not know he's wrong.

And it turns out that Steve's not going down without a fight.

 

~~~

 

But at least this time Tony has made the right decision, and it will all, all of it, be worth it.

He has made the right decision. He has, he has, he has.

Hasn't he?

 

 

 


	2. Steve

Tony had always seemed to Steve a pernicious, grandiose being, larger than life, with a personality and intellect so great Steve felt the size of an ant in comparison. His eyes were very dark, almost black, sometimes, and with a sharpness and brittleness to them, like obsidian, like he could, maybe _would_ , shatter under pressure, separate all into keen broken edges ready to draw blood.

Steve thinks that Tony has been broken before, but he's pulled himself together, stronger than he would have thought himself. Steve thinks that Tony feels things more deeply than others, everything needling him, plunging all the way into his core and lodging there. The cracks stay in him no matter how many times he reassembles himself. He carries the weight of his guilt, of others' pain, like a doomed man his cross. That sensitivity, of self, must be in part why he is so insensitive of others... reflexive, a turning-away, like if he hums his Black Sabbath loudly enough he won't be able to hear the cries of suffering all about him.

He does not ignore it, though. He is as much a defender, an Avenger, as Steve is, but he is a man in armor, soft within hard, battered and bruised, tender like nut meat in its shell. Vulnerable.

“Big man in a suit of armor,” Steve said to him, before he really understood, when he was still taken in by the lie of Tony Stark's flashy, uncaring persona, a different kind of shield. “Take that off, what are you?”

“Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist,” Tony said, rattling the labels off, slick deflections, ready with them like someone who'd been kept awake nights, staring at the ceiling and probing at his own identity as one would tongue an aching tooth. Like someone self-centered, Steve thought at the time. Like someone who's done a lot of soul-searching, he thinks now.

Steve understands soul-searching. He understands staying awake nights and staring at the ceiling. Wondering if there's a point to any of it.

Vowing to be the one to make a difference for the better.

“You're gonna get yourself killed one'a these days, Stevie,” Bucky said, pulling him into a headlock so he could wipe blood from Steve's busted lip with his grungy sleeve, scarlet seeping into off-white, staining it rusty. Bucky licked his thumb and smoothed out Steve's eyebrows, like a mother cat washing a caterwauling kitten, and Steve could not break free and escape Bucky's ministrations no matter how hard he squirmed.

“ _Jerk,_ ” he wheezed at Bucky, and Bucky laughed and called him _Punk_.

Bucky had always loved those science fiction pulp stories, grand adventure and gleaming inventions. Ooh'd and aah'd over that sort of stuff, was buzzed about the Stark exhibition for weeks ahead of time, underling it in his letters from boot camp. He was so pleased he got to go before he had to ship out.

Steve had woken up and all about him was the unfamiliar, the miraculous. He'd turn to one side to say, _Hey, see that, whaddaya think of that, isn't it amazing?_ And there would be no one there. No one to share the wonder with, and eventually all that wonder just curdled, just shriveled right up and left him in his grief and his loneliness, a stranger in a strange land. It had only been weeks since Bucky fell, just beyond the reach of his fingertips. Only weeks, when Steve looked around at the ruins of New York City in the wake of the Chitauri invasion and the most familiar thing about it was the fact that it was a warzone, the dust and debris just beginning to settle, sifting into his scalp like an Ash Wednesday smudge over his brow.

Howard Stark's eyes were darker, a little bit of a truer black than Tony's, more deeply set. They were distant, detached, always running calculations which took him away from the present. He seemed to blink less than other people, was surprised by less, on a constant even keel. He seemed effortlessly worldly.

Steve admired him tremendously. He was, after all, the man who'd made his shield, the man who helped outfit the Howlies with their specialized, top-of-the-line gear, tailored it to them so that out in the field when the bullets were flying there was that much more of a likelihood that they would not die.

Tony Stark did the same for Steve's new team, these new people he grew close to, his new... family. And yet it took so much longer for Steve to admire Tony rather than feel intimidated by him. Everything with Tony was a challenge, was tripwires and misdirection and sudden ambushes, the ground unsteady beneath Steve's blundering feet.

His ma would tsk at him, _Tsk tsk tsk, why can't you make any friends, Steve?_

If Steve had been a girl he would've been called bossy, pushy, snobby, prudish, uppity, out of line. He saw his mother bow her head and avert her gaze when she was too tired, too wasted away from grueling work hours and that persistent cough which dotted her handkerchiefs with blood, too exhausted to stand up and defend herself, like her existence as an equal was something which needed _defending_. And little Steve Rogers would put himself in front of her and the world and tell them what's what, would dare them to just try. And because Steve was a boy, the other boys did not only mock him, but they fought him, they met his dare with their fists. But because Steve was a boy he had always had the slimmest chance of joining up, and he had been chosen, in the end, and in that ending he became a “leader of men,” nevermind Peggy behind the scenes, bent over the maps and rulers with her strong, capable hands and her bright brown, brilliant tactician's eyes, the rage as alight within her as it was within Steve himself, if not more so, and yet she was not selected for the procedure. Steve had looked at her once and realized with a crystalline clarity that she would have been perfect for it, Peggy, fierce Peggy Carter, that had she been unleashed upon the Eastern Front the war would have been won in half the time which it took for Steve, slogging through the mire of ugly guerilla conflicts, organizing out-of-the-way hit-and-runs on Hydra bases.

Yet another injustice Steve could never make right.

In the end, the happy storybook end, he was heralded as a hero, an icon, and it was because of his maleness that his attitude was a help rather than a hindrance, because of that that he was _allowed_ to never compromise and never surrender. And they all lived happily ever after.

Until...

 _I don't need friends, Ma, I have Bucky,_ Steve said by way of answer.

Bucky, charming Bucky, always bailing Steve's pugnacious ass out of the fire. Everyone loved Bucky, and Bucky, in turn, got along with pretty much anyone, or at least he seemed to. Steve used to watch him twirl with the girls in the dance halls, and would smother a quiet jealousy in the cage of his thin, ribbed chest. He never knew of whom he was jealous of, and that was one of the few things that frightened him, deep down in a secret place.

And then he dragged Bucky out of Azzano, and the blithe charmer, the fearless lady's man, he was suddenly full up of fear, would wake thrashing in their tent, his teeth clenched and eyes rolling and a sheen of sweat over his entire body, like varnish over wood, making his agonies look like those of a carved angel's, caught in torment. But he still smiled during the day, that famous grin with the dimple in his chin, still had Steve's back. They followed each other like they were playing a game of tag, Bucky to war, Steve to war, Bucky to ice, Steve to ice, always missing each other, a moment apart even when they were together.

Less than years and yet almost a century later, and Steve's childhood friend, his best friend, his only friend, stood in front of him, his mask having fallen to reveal his face, a metal arm attached to his shoulder, grotesque and gleaming and everything Bucky could have imagined of _the future, Steve, I bet it's a mighty swell place. Wish I could see it_.

“So, heard you blew up a few helicarriers without me,” is what Tony would say, when Steve arrived in Stark, no, Avenger's Tower with a duffel thrown over his shoulder and Sam at his heels, a new ally, friend, indispensable, Steve's rock. ( _Rocks don't fly, Rogers,_ Sam laughed, but ducked his head, his ears flushing red.) “Quite a party. Pity I wasn't invited, I would've shown you how to really kick it in gear.”

“Next time there's a widespread Nazi splinter group infiltrating one of the largest, far-reaching intelligence organizations in the world and we have literally hours to react while isolated on-site, I'll be sure to give you a call so you can put together the after party,” Steve said, and Tony grinned and grinned at him, a little manic, secondhand terror roiling beneath the surface.

Tony hadn't called for help when he invited a radical terrorist group to blow up his home, when he went to ground without even a suit, when Pepper was abducted and experimented on. He could've died so many times over, and there was no serum pumping through his veins, no cold cradle of ice lying in wait to preserve him within its subzero heart.

He'd destroyed all his Iron Man suits, tens of them, millions upon billions of dollars' worth of unique, unparalleled technology blasting apart in a pyrotechnic pledge to the woman he loved, the woman who saved him, and yet Steve knew that he was already breaking that promise, already constructing his newest suit down in his workshop, because he was Iron Man, whether he wore the armor or not, and he had a duty to fulfill, a hyper-tense _need_ filling the void left by the absent arc reactor. He still had the tic where he would tap his sternum, expecting to encounter glass and metal, and instead he'd suddenly be clutching at a patch of reconstructed flesh and bone, panic setting in before he remembered.

Steve knew that some things cannot be changed within oneself simply because one says so. There are scars not of the flesh, after all, and no matter how much one may regret it, the path of action which one must take is too often already laid out in advance. Immutable. Inevitable.

 

~~~

 

“ _Bucky?”_

_“Who the hell is Bucky?”_

 

~~~

 

He feels protective of Tony and wary of him in almost equal measure, especially in the early days, before their posturing gives way to their tentative, then grudging, then natural camaraderie and sometimes juvenile rivalry. It's ridiculous to feel protective. At every turn Tony reminds him of all he's missed, of decades of innovation and pop culture, the rise and fall of entire generations which went on while he slumbered in his quasi-death, oblivious in the depths of his not-quite-ultimate sacrifice. Tony can more than take care of himself. He is peerless, scintillating. He has the same glib worldliness as Howard's, but wielded like a knife, his tortured compassion wired up like a bomb, everything about him weaponized so long as it's within reach of his clever engineer's hands.

Even stripped of everything Tony would be the type to sharpen a stick into a stake, just so that he was not left without something to brandish, threateningly or teasingly, it does not matter.

He looks, and he sees the brittleness in his eyes, the mysteries of his whole life stretching out into a past from which Steve was suspended, and...

Tony told him that after he went missing, Howard looked for him. For years, as though there was some spark of hope. Steve had barely known Howard, they'd barely met, he just looked up to him, and Howard, perhaps, looked back, looked down, at his creation. But not his greatest.

“Do you know me?” Steve asked, and Bucky...

“Did you tell him yet?” Natasha asked, draped over the couch with feline grace and languor, and she's toying with the stem of her wine glass, running the gun-calloused pad of her manicured finger around the rim to hear it sing, not looking at him as she sometimes does when she does not wish to influence another's answer.

She's talking of Tony. Of Tony's parents. Of what she and Steve learned amidst the dusty, deteriorating databanks which were all that was left of Zola's mind, as he spun an entrancing little tale to keep them in place, occupied, as the missiles honed in.

“No,” Steve said, and Natasha stops, the melodic ringing of the glass which danced on the edge of a screech fading to silence.

“Are you going to?” she asked.

Steve thought of it, thought of trying to explain, trying to... make him understand, keep him from... cracking, again, thought of inflicting that sort of a blow onto Tony Stark, with his vibrancy and his expansive humanity and that old, deep, itching pain ingrained under his skin....

“No,” said Steve. “I'm not.”

And he knows that he's a coward. He may be telling himself that it is in Tony's best interests, but it isn't. It can't be. It is a lie.

 _Forgive me father for I have sinned_.

But Steve Rogers has always known the drastic lengths he'd go to, the lying, the cheating, the stealing, to keep James Buchanan Barnes safe. As long as he is safe, as long as _everyone_ is safe, then so be it. It's about time he was the one to carry some of that weight he's seen on Tony's too-narrow, too-human, too-breakable shoulders.

He looks around at his new team, sometimes, in the middle of a training exercise, or a meeting, and he's almost overcome with how much he cares for them all. They are his family, his loved ones, they trust him and he puts the entirety of his faith in them in turn.

(Wanda's glowing, fractal tendrils of telekinesis, holding in Rumlow's explosion, flinging him away from Steve because it is instinct, by then, to defend each other, and the blast scythes through the building, several levels up, plaster and stucco clouding outward, billowing from the gash as steel support beams screech and the structure collapses, and there are _screams,_ there were _people in there_ —)

They are, all of them, people. Just as the casualties were. That's what the Accords don't take into account; they are seen as storms in bottles, they are treated as forces to be contained, potential threats to be proactively neutralized and controlled. The sheaf of official papers lists indignity after indignity, proposes they be stripped of their independence, their humanity, their very personhood.

They are _people_ , not mere dumb weapons to be pointed and discharged. They have hopes and dreams and integrity and _minds of their own_.

Perhaps Tony has been in the weapons industry too long, and sees only the danger. Even in his closest allies it is their power which catches his attention first. He is not scared of them, as the public have become... but there is a self-loathing Steve has glimpsed within him, sometimes, in the dark, in the clench of his hand, white-knuckled, around a glass of scotch, the glittering, scathing flash of his eyes, a crawling, inwardly-directed malignancy which Steve doubts he would admit even to himself, and Steve wonders if this is Tony calling for the divine punishment which has failed to strike him down yet, despite all his brashness, all his flirting with death. If this is Tony trying to push through the reckoning he owes to the universe, if this is Tony making amends for all his prior sins.

 _It has been... a long, long time, since my last confession_.

 

~~~

 

“Do you know me?” Steve asked, and Bucky...

Did.

 

 

 

 


	3. Natasha

Natasha was never a child the way that snakes are never children. They are smaller, yes, but they are no less without instinct, no less coldblooded.

If she were ever a child, she was in name only. A monster in a child's skin. A weapon in human guise.

Ballet dancers wrap their feet in bandages, within the slippers with soles reinforced by blocks of wood, so that when they form blisters and the blisters break the silk is not stained with blood and they can dance on, a perfect performance, flawless, tireless, the very epitome of unsullied grace.

“I have red in my ledger,” she said to an unstable megalomaniac momentarily contained within glass, and sadists are always most hungry for the pain of the proud, the disgrace of a fellow predator, and he swallows the bait, lets her reel him in, the hook made savory with a chunk of her own flesh, a bit of honesty for spice. It goes down smooth and she walks away smooth, steps a sultry sway because that is how the dance instructors taught her, the memory of the body deeper than the regret of the soul.

“Okay,” she says, voice thin in the aftermath of the grenade explosion, the smoke burning in her throat and the deck of the Lumerian Star steady beneath her as it cuts through the sea, secrets of a backed-up hard drive safe in the memory stick clenched in her hand, “that one's on me.”

People think that she is humorless, a killing machine, and machines are without mirth (though she'd ask them to take a look at Tony Stark's AIs, or his bumbling little robots which whir around in circles when they're pleased). People would be wrong. Because Natasha is nothing if not observant, self-aware, able to step outside of herself and assess a situation from afar, and the one constant she's noticed in life is irony. Compare one thing to another to find the incongruous discrepancy, compare reality to expectation, truth to lies, and there in the odd-shaped space in between you have your humor, you have something funny. And Natasha... well, she laughs on the inside. Maybe utters a deadpan one-liner or a blatant understatement to clinch everything together, a cherry on top, an indulgence which she allows herself... because she is _not_ a machine, she _has_ a personality.

She has her humor even when she has nothing else left. A secret she doesn't even try to keep, and yet, somehow, a secret it remains: ironic.

“You're damn right it is,” said Steve in reply, hearing only her confession, because he is not open to humor when his sense of justice is riled up, too entrenched in the wrongs of the present, the concrete seriousness. He does not shrug things off, cannot smirk to himself when there is blood spilled. He is a man of conscience and action, not one who can step outside of himself, take himself away and look at things from a distance where they cease to matter.

She would pity him, if she were not too busy castigating herself. And even then, in the moment of self-reproach, she is tipping her head back to thunk against the bulkhead and rolling her eyes at her own folly, her own foot-in-mouth mistake.

“So you're the Black Widow,” Barton had said to her, when they first met. He'd been following her for weeks and she'd been slipping out of his unerring sight, or she'd thought she had, to shadow him in return, rifling through the bag in his cheap hotel room with the rickety bed and dingy carpet. He'd left her a note with a smiley face on it, unopened granola bars and bottles of water with a scribbled reminder of the importance of hydration, especially in this lovely, sweltering, South American climate where it is all sun, sun, sun, shining away.

She took the food and water, tested them for the drugs she knew she'd find, maybe the poison which would take her out, easy as anything, a silent, foaming-mouthed death tucked away in her bolthole, her corpse found only when the smell of rot was enough to lead others to its decomposing source.

It was just a couple plain, unopened granola bars, plain, unopened bottled water. Untampered, offered in good will... a mind game, she'd thought, a trick. She would remain vigilant.

“Hawkeye,” she says back, and he smiles, fast and sharp, his head nodding as he twisted in his seat to look at her, his eyes hidden behind mirrored wraparound glasses.

“You've heard of me,” he says, a pleased, drawling exclamation, and she does not know what to make of him, was still waiting for him to make his move as they sat there at the round white table on their white folding chairs in the fresh, cool breeze coming off the ocean with its white sand beach. She had on a large, floppy woven sunhat, a cotton sundress with spaghetti straps, both white with little floral embellishments of pastel color. Her arms looked soft and bare and vulnerable and the dress seemed too short to hide her weapons, both facts lies. He was is his tac gear, everything black and purple Kevlar and obviously stifling, not even trying to blend in, and he did not have his bow in hand, his quiver absent and holsters empty. Facts which also had to be lies.

He was there to kill her. Surely.

“I'm famous,” he mutters to himself, self-satisfied, shit-eating grin plastered firmly in place as he turned to gaze off at the cerulean waves stretching out into the distance.

“You're here to kill me,” she says. Trying to keep this on track, move it along. “Hurry it up.”

“Pffft,” he says, with a dismissive wave, and he lifts his piña colada, puts the straw to his lips, swallows up the dregs with an obnoxiously long, noisy suck which hollows out his cheeks and makes the ice cubes clink. “Patience is a virtue.”

“You're a sniper. It's a necessity,” she tells him, and he grins again, fast and easy and relaxed, delighted as a bird with its feathers preened.

“I'm not here to kill you,” is what he told her. “Well, I mean, I _was,_ but screw that. I'm a strong, independent operative who don't need to fulfill no mission objective.”

“You are... feeble-minded?” she asks, because is he? Is that the reason? That their agent has gone off the deep end after one traumatic brain injury too many?

(One day she will fight him when his eyes are glowing an unnatural blue and every blow of his against her is meant to be lethal, and she beats him into unconsciousness, putting him out even after the blue has been knocked out of his eyes and he's blinking blearily up at her, saying her name. When he wakes up she calls it cognitive recalibration, then says “I hit you really hard on the head,” like a joke, like irony.)

“A case could be made,” he says considerately, back in time, back on the beach with the waves crashing in the distance. “But, nah. You're... you're just a freaking kid. You have no options, after burning the Red Room to the ground all on your lonesome... good job, by the way, really admired your work on that... you're unattached, on the run, just been putting down anyone coming after you. Way I see it, it's self-defense.”

She's gone still, like if she stays absolutely motionless he will not be able to see her anymore, like she may finally be invisible, untouched by his words, but he turns to lean forward toward her, elbows on the table, and takes off his glasses so he can look into her eyes. So she can look into his and gauge the truth there.

“You deserve a second chance. I'm willing to give it to you. Sooo... here it is. That's what I'm offering. If you want it.” And he'd shrugged again, leaned back until his chair was balanced precariously on just two legs, put his hands behind his head like he hadn't a care in the world. “Take your time,” he said, and smiled.

And... hesitantly, doubtfully, still more of a self-preservationist instinct to mirror, to appear friendly and non-threatening, than anything else... she smiled back.

 

~~~

 

Clint Barton is a good guy.

That what she thinks of him. Honestly thinks. He's just a normal, laid back, go-with-the-flow-except-for-when-he's-decided-to-be-impulsive guy who uses a prehistoric weapon made glitzy and glamorous with the latest tech, has a secret family tucked away on a farm that only three people in S.H.I.E.L.D., including herself, know about, and once, long ago, he was given the kill order, looked at his target, and made a different call.

Natasha Romanov is not a good person.

That is what she knows of herself. It doesn't really matter as much as what choices she makes, what actions she takes, but it's still there, the indisputable reality of her existence. She is, _fundamentally,_ an evil which exists in the world. Evil, after all, is subjective, fleeting, an amorphous, indestructible concept, and she was conceived and conceptualized as an insidious, implacable force of quiet destruction, a death-giver in an ivory skin of beauty, and there is no changing her origin point, no way to alter it or cleanse it from the earth no matter how many fires she's lit, how much salt she's sown in the ashes.

But walking forward she can put her skills to use. To the right side, the side of light and good, the side of Clint Barton. She can live up to the unasked-for, unforeseen faith he had put in her, or at least she can try, even though it is a debt she can never do enough to repay. Her skills may still be the same ones... but the goal... the goal is...

“I thought I knew whose lies I was telling,” she said to Steve, and she's smiling, wry, and feels bitter, and on the verge of breaking. Betrayal should not hurt so to a habitual traitor such as her, even a betrayal of this magnitude. It should not hurt someone who hurts so much, hurts herself in the line of duty, and her duty is to hurt others, to infiltrate, to gather intel, to leave ruins in her wake and slip out all unseen, but at least the goal is a pure one, the goal is noble... was noble... she'd thought it was...

She'd thought it was.

The desert. Outside of Odessa. Sand gritty on her tongue, in the wound through her lower stomach, weeping red, a mangled glimpse of wormlike blue, slick and bulging against her fingers as she fumbles with a handful of bandages, applies pressure and struggles not to pass out beneath the vast, indifferent bowl of the night sky, the jeep overturned a ways away, the cooling body of her charge cushioning her where she lays, feeling intestines through the bullet hole, left by a Soviet slug, no rifling. Good thing her uterus was already useless. Otherwise, why, she might've been... upset...

She is a dull weapon, stupid, slow, still taking shape, still being honed. The other girls of the Room, though, they are more stupid, are even slower and more formless. At least she has an edge to sharpen.

 _This one,_ the instructors say, hands warm and approving as they pinch the tender underside of her upper arm to show how she reacts so little to pain, as they pull at her chin to lever her jaw open and look at her teeth, small and white and sound, some missing as the new ones grow in, as they curl her fingers around the grip of a gun — _this one is to be our pride. This one will carry us to greatness._

They are proud and so she is, too, a wonderful reassurance welling within her chest. She has meaning, a purpose to fulfill, a preordained destiny. She will never receive any of the thanks, the glory, never reap any of the rewards, but what need has a tool for such hollow incentives? What need has a weapon for motivation?

 _On loan from Hydra,_ they say of the instructor with the metal arm, and he is like a storm made flesh, ruthless, it is futile to stand against him and several of the girls die under his tutelage, smashed and left limp on the ground like broken dolls. She ducks and weaves and deflects, swirls around him, clamping her thighs around his neck tight as a vice and throwing all her weight backwards to make him lose his. He falls face-down, she lands on her feet, ready to run, ready to reengage. The end of the session is announced and the man rises, expression blank, but then as he's passing her a spark of something, approval, lights the dead gray of his eyes, and he chucks her under the chin, gently, it does not snap her neck, and he pauses, brow furrowing, arm frozen in front of her.

She dares to ask him, in a whisper, if he is all right, because she knows he is not like the other instructors, knows that he has no name, no life, no mind of his own. They are of a kind, the two of them, and so she risks this small display of concern.

He smiles, a slow, creeping thing like the springtime, doting and cocky, a smile that makes other people smile back, and for a moment it warms even his wintry eyes, creasing the skin at the corners in familiar paths like the waters of a flash flood rushing through riverbeds long dry. He nods, ruffles her hair before dropping his arm, but the glint of individuality is already fading as his Hydra handler calls out to him, a sharp command like a whip crack, _Soldat,_ and then he is gone.

She hears his screams that night, echoing through the compound.

It is the first time she can remember feeling fear.

Fear is an extravagantly selfish thing, an expensive thing. It makes one run from danger to save oneself, it costs the lives of others. That night it flickers to life like a candle flame within her and she nurtures it from then on, cherishes it, holds it close. Her greatest treasure, her ultimate secret.

Bruce Banner slams his hands onto the table, shouts _“Stop lying to me,”_ and draws it, guttering and naked, out into the open air, steals her secret from her just like _that_.

She is running in a straight line, making herself more of a target as she yells for the civilians to _Go, get out of the way,_ and the bullet takes her in the shoulder, yet again... she knows it is of Soviet make, no rifling, and this time she is not an obstacle but the aim, she is being stalked by the man who once chucked her under the chin and smiled at her when no one had ever done so before...

She pulls her gun on Banner and trembles, head turned slightly aside, the tendons of her neck drawn taut like Clint's bowstring.

“I'm sorry,” he says, straightening and backing away, showing his empty hands to her and with a quirk at the corner of his mouth, rueful, recognizable, a muscle memory pinging at her lips. “That was mean.” Mild as milk, an understatement so vast. But this is one thing Natasha cannot laugh at.

It is not death which frightens her. It is the fact that she wants to live, so badly, and wants to live as herself, not as an automaton, an empty, expendable shell. That horror occurs to hers sometimes...

( _...when she is looking into the face of the ghost, the bedtime story told to scare little spiders into line, the Winter Soldier..._ )

...and she cannot afford it. She casts it away. But then here is Banner, and there is no way to kill the force within him, no way to allay it, reason with it, manipulate it. It is crude and crushing and unstoppable. There is _no control_ to be gleaned against it. There is only...

Bruce is unassuming and socially awkward, wears glasses to avoid eye contact as much as to rectify his myopia. He is slow to wake in the mornings, pads around for a while in pajama pants and bare feet, and he smiles even when he doesn't mean it, puts up a veneer of stable serenity which she can of course see through, her eyes not so farsighted as Clint's, but she can always see into the shadows, into the heart, and he is as frightened of himself as anybody else may be. More than that: he is frightened of others as much as they are of him. There is an aching emotional vulnerability which comes with his physical invulnerability, a deep discomfort in his own skin, self-loathing and guilt squirming like maggots in the rot of his soul as he makes amends for past hubris.

Natasha sees all this because she makes herself, creeps up upon him over a period of months, insinuates herself into his presence, and the entire time fear hums bright under her skin, rattling in her atoms, her legs always poising themselves to _run,_ to _run_ from a monster more fully realized than she herself has ever had the slimmest possibility of being, to run from the unconditionally and unthinkingly savage, from _death,_ and yet...

She confides to Clint at one point, and he laughs at her, tells her she has a crush like a preteen girl, tells her to buck up and act on it. She pins him to the exercise mat until he's tapping frantically at her thigh for mercy and choking out, _“Uncle, uncle, jeez.”_ He snaps his towel at her ass later and she catches it, rolls her eyes, and he says, “Seriously, though, good luck.”

...And yet there are odd similarities between them, basic, inhuman things, and simultaneously she is charmed by his self-effacing peculiarities, the fact that Bruce drinks awful herbal teas instead of coffee, that everyone looks forward to the nights he cooks dinner because it is invariably spicy and healthy and delicious, and after Sokovia, after he leaves, after he abandons the nascent glimmer of a future they could share between them, she tracks him down to a rural African village where he's once again playing doctor, once again alone and on the run and stolidly guilt-ridden, and she asks him if he really wants to give up. Really thinks that it would be impossible.

He avoids her eyes, inconspicuously wrings his hands as he says, very, very gently, “I'm sorry, Natasha.”

Anger, too, is a selfish, expensive emotion. Better to do without.

 

~~~

 

“We're still friends, right?” she asks, glib, and it is neither the time nor place to have this sort of exchange but they've always engaged in unprofessional small-talk and chatter on the battlefield, but this isn't a real battle, this can't be a real fight, and she is... she wants to know.

“Depends on how hard you hit me,” Clint replies, out of breath as he offers up the joke, but there is subtext there, a clause, a catch...

She held his newborn children in her arms, teased him with Laura as he fussed over her, frantic in his new fatherhood, but proud, unbelievably proud, and he trusts Natasha _that much..._

He can remain nobody's friend if he is dead. After all.

 

~~~

 

None of them seem to understand. They all begin to split into sides, falling behind Steve or Tony, they start polarizing to radical positions like there is no compromise to be had, and she feels the middle ground giving way beneath her feet.

What fools they are. What idiots. How blind.

This all she thinks, and then she steps outside of herself, looks on things from a distance. Offers paltry comfort to a grieving son even as he spirals into anger, vengeance. She makes the rational decision, the survivor's decision, cautious and compliant, and find it overturned for a man who requested her friendship when she asked what he wanted her to be to him, swept up in his ridiculous, idealistic crusade, when she falls into line beside him, protecting another man who once again tried to eliminate her and in whom there was not a spark of recognition when she searched for it, called out for it, and then later he runs again, always running, now, but this time she places herself between him and his pursuers...

And Clint. With his trust. His faith.

Tony accuses her of being unable to drop the double agent act when she sees him again, after the airport, and he has always been frustrating, from the first meeting between him and “Natalie,” but she's always been able to see... into shadows, into the heart, and she knows he is more shadowed, has more heart, than perhaps anyone she's ever known... besides...

...herself.

None of them understand, in the thick of it, when the blood is running high and hot, but they will. They must.

There are no sides between them. Only a whole, briefly fractured.

 

 

 

 


End file.
